Updates and things…

Swans swimming along…

Whilst on the face of it, everything has been a bit quiet on the website front on the research project… in fact it’s a bit like a swan swimming along – serene and gentle on the surface and paddling madly underwater!

In fact, also, work has been getting in the way & as at the moment that pays much better, I’ve had to focus on that!

So a brief update…

First of all some sad news… Yves Brion has informed me that M Gilbert Raimbault (who aged 9 saw the various “Men in the Shed” as his father was the village baker & the shed their grain store) has passed away. He had been ill for a while & in hospital since December. It was an honour & pleasure to meet Gilbert & also to be able to introduce him to Martha & Sam Bowen on their visit to Normandy a couple of years ago. Martha is one of Raymond Elledge’s daughters & Gilbert described him to her… as hubby Sam said – he’s never seen her grinning so much!

This main website is undergoing some work on the “back end” – as at the moment, with all of the content it’s a little slow to load & also it is approaching the limit of my space availability that I pay for. Also, as it was designed a few years ago, it’s not “mobile friendly”. So the plan is to use this for the annual trip reports (as usual) and details of the men & their history – so nothing different to what we currently have… however, the big change is that the number of photographs on the site will be reduced (it’s them that take up a lot of the space & when I first started, I didn’t reduce the size of the photos). Moving forward, there will be enough to tell the story (& their individual stories), but the main photo storage will be on Facebook… we have a Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/MenintheShed/) which will have a Photo Album for each of the Men & that will hold all of the images that we have. There is also be a Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/MenintheShed/) which will have details of our research trips to Normandy & anything else that we discover (so similar to the Blogs on the main site) but it will also host a much larger collection of photos.

Also, I’m setting up a forum which will have threads running on each of the men for people (friends, family, etc) to add information, discuss stuff, etc Eventually, this will (hopefully) integrated into the main website; in the short term there will be a link

Eventually, as & when funds permit, I’ll be talking to my web designers to have the site updated & made “mobile friendly” which should also make it easier to use

Glyn is helping me with all of this & hopefully, between us, it will all be sorted soon as we think that we understand between ourselves what we want & would like to have it sorted in time for our next trip to Normandy!

GDPR and email newsletters

And finally, here in the UK we’re fast approaching the deadline for GDPR which states that anyone who sends out newsletter type emails needs to have specific (and recorded) permission to do so. As a result, moving forward, I’m going to be doing updates via Mailchimp – I use this for work & it seems to be ok, so it makes sense to use it for the Men in the Shed, too… so, if you’d like to continue to receive emails (& hopefully you will), you’ll need to go onto this page of the website http://www.menintheshed.com/contact-me/ and complete the Newsletter Signup form. You’ll then receive an email asking you to confirm that you want to receive the newsletter (to be GDPR compliant it has to be “double opt in”). If there is someone who you think I may have missed with this email… please forward it (or let them know about the new newsletter format)